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Columnated ruins domino
Join Date: Mar 2003
Location: Melrose, MA
Posts: 9,999
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Why I Hate China: Reason #853,627,194
Honestly, I love the food but what the fuck is wrong with this neanderthal Chinese government? I wish the US had the balls to really put heat on China for its endless list of human rights travesties.
Whistle-blowers in China sent to mental hospital
Report: Those citing unfairness often targeted
By Andrew Jacobs, New York Times | December 9, 2008
BEIJING - Local officials in Shandong Province have apparently found a cost-effective way to deal with gadflies, whistle-blowers, and all manner of muckraking citizens who dare to challenge the authorities: dispatch them to the local psychiatric hospital.
In an investigative report published yesterday by a state-owned newspaper, public security officials in the city of Xintai in Shandong Province have been institutionalizing residents who persist in their personal campaigns to expose corruption or the unfair seizure of their property. Some people said they were committed for up to two years, and several of those interviewed said they were forcibly medicated.
The article, in The Beijing News, said most inmates were released after they agreed to give up their causes.
Sun Fawu, 57, a farmer seeking compensation for land spoiled by a coal mining operation, said he was seized by local authorities on his way to petition the central government in Beijing and taken to the Xintai Mental Health Center in October.
During a 20-day stay, he said, he was lashed to a bed, forced to take pills and given injections that made him numb and woozy. When he told the doctor he was a petitioner, not mentally ill, the doctor reportedly said, "I don't care if you're sick or not. As long as you are sent by the township government, I'll treat you as a mental patient."
In an interview, the hospital's director, Wu Yuzhu, acknowledged that some of the 18 patients brought there by the police in recent years were not deranged, but he said that the hospital had no choice but to take them in. "The hospital also had its misgivings," he said.
Xintai officials do not see any shame in the tactic, and they boasted that hospitalizing troublemakers saved money otherwise spent chasing them to the capital - where local security officers rack up steep hotel and restaurant bills. There is another reason to stop petitioners, the aggrieved citizens who seek redress from higher levels of government: They can prove embarrassing to local officials, especially if they make it to Beijing.
The article was notable for the attention it gained in China's notably constrained state-run media. Communist Party stalwarts such as the People's Daily and the Xinhua news agency republished the article, and it was picked up by scores of websites. At the country's most popular portal, Sina.com, it ranked as the fifth most-viewed news headline, and readers posted more than 23,000 comments by evening.
The indignation expressed was universal, with many clamoring for the dismissal of those involved. "They're no different from animals," read one post. "No, they're worse."
By yesterday evening, the Xintai city government was rejecting The Beijing News report as reckless and slanted. In a telephone interview broadcast on Shandong provincial television, an unidentified municipal official suggested that those confined to the mental hospital had gone mad from their single-minded quest for justice.
"There are some people who have been petitioning for years and become mentally aggravated," the official said. Reached by phone yesterday, a hospital employee said Wu, the hospital director who voiced his misgivings to The Beijing News, was unavailable. The employee, Hu Peng, said that officials from the local government had taken him away for "a meeting" earlier in the day.
Although he would not provide contact information for the former patients, the employee defended the hospitalizations, saying all those delivered by the Public Security Bureau were sick.
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